I would like to run Firefox Quantum along side Firefox ESR, but the last time I installed the former, using a different folder, then it completely took over, meaning trying to run ESR resulted in Firefox 57 running, thus disabling the multiplicity of useful extensions, which is why I find Firefox superior to all other families of browsers. I am running Windows 10 64 bit (somewhat customized, thank God , with a 4.2 ghz cpu and 16gb ram.

If anyone needs to know why I want to run Quantum along side Firefox ESR, I have been a heavy Firefox user for years, running at least 3 profiles concurrently (such as one mainly for forums and ongoing research, another for shopping, another for for weather and videos, etc.) with multiple tabs (some with over 100), all of which is very feasible due to extensions (such as Tab Mix Plus, enabling multiple tab rows and reduced width; FT DeepDark theme - beautiful yet compact -; Colorful Tabs for better distinguishing tabs; Session Manager for best saving/restoring of sessions;, Lazarus: Form Recovery for potentially saving hours of work: Noiascrollbars - beauty and far better visibility -; BBCodeXtra for custom commands to insert BBCode/Html/XHtml code; FindBar Tweak for keeping the find bar open; Stay-Open Menu which opens Bookmarks in tabs without losing the menu; Signature for inserting custom text into posts; Count word professional to see how many characters and words; Memory Restart which indicates how much ram FF is using, and enables easy restart to flush memory, and some other extensions).

Some of these may have been rewritten as web extensions, which I need to run Quantum to test, and which I would like to upgrade to, while many will not work with it and will not be rewritten to do so, thus I also want to use ESR, and FF states that "As such there is no plan at this time to end ESR releases, the next ESR version will be 31 and each subsequent one will be 7 version numbers higher. At some point down the road we might need to reclaim the resources ESR uses, perhaps turn over the build generation to community, or other issues with backporting security fixes might become blockers that result in this branch being to rest."

Any help with this or comments are welcome.

Last edited by PeaceByJesus on March 7th, 2018, 8:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

I already know how to have separate Firefox folders and using a separate Profile for each, but the problem is that with Quantum, even installing it in a separate folder means ESR will no longer work. I can open my profiles which I used ESR for, but which nukes the extensions, but ESR itself would no longer work with them after i installed Quantum.

August 28th – End of life for ESR 52 and release of ESR 60.2.0. No further updates will be offered for ESR52 and an update to ESR 60.2.0 will be provided through the application update service

Also please keep in mind that Firefox 57, released last month, supports only add-ons built with the WebExtensions API. This means that Firefox 52 ESR is the last release that will support legacy add-ons.

Last edited by PeaceByJesus on March 7th, 2018, 8:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm able to run both version 57 (Quantum) and version 57 on this Win 10 machine without problems. If you have separate program installation directories and separate profiles for each program version, there should be no interaction between Quantum and the profile/data used by the ESR installation.

Why not try running the portable version of Quantum from a flash drive to eliminate any cross-contamination risk?

DanRaisch wrote:I'm able to run both version 57 (Quantum) and version 57 on this Win 10 machine without problems. If you have separate program installation directories and separate profiles for each program version, there should be no interaction between Quantum and the profile/data used by the ESR installation.

Why not try running the portable version of Quantum from a flash drive to eliminate any cross-contamination risk?

You "run both version 57 (Quantum) and version 57.." Do you mean you run both version 57 (Quantum) and version 52 ESR?

Running the portable or Nightly would work, but can I install web extensions on the portable?

Last edited by PeaceByJesus on March 7th, 2018, 8:56 am, edited 1 time in total.

Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) is intended for system administrators who deploy and maintain the desktop environment in organizations such as universities and other schools, county or city governments and businesses.

Releases will be maintained for more than a year, with point releases containing security updates coinciding with regular Firefox releases. The ESR will also have a two cycles (12 week) overlap between the time of a new release and the end-of-life of the previous release to permit testing and certification prior to deploying a new version.